A Neighborhood in Peril: Garfield residents desperate to move, but bound to Superfund neighborhood

By SCOTT FALLON

STAFF WRITER
|

The Record

Michael Riccio loved his basement.

Bernice Riccio's Garfield home is in a Superfund site. The sump pump, provided by the EPA, controls the flooding that brings cancer-causing hexavalent chromium into the basement.

He called it his "man cave," a woodworking shop that was a respite from the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and three daughters on Lincoln Place in Garfield.

Riccio with husband Michael, who died of leukemia in 2008. He used the basement as his workshop.

The basement often flooded during a hard rain. And unbeknown to Riccio, that floodwater coated his basement with hexavalent chromium, a deadly carcinogen.

Riccio, 56, died of leukemia in May 2008.

A few months after his death, the federal Environmental Protection Agency began testing basements in the neighborhood for contamination — 25 years after nearly 3 tons of hexavalent chromium had spilled at a nearby factory.

Chromium was found in Riccio's basement. While the substance has not been linked to leukemia, his widow is sure that at the very least it exacerbated his illness.

"Maybe he would have gotten [leukemia] without it," Bernice Riccio said. "But he was always down there. And it was always down there with him."

The Riccio house is in New Jersey's latest Superfund site: a neighborhood of 600 homes and businesses sitting atop a massive plume of hexavalent chromium that the federal government says is "an immediate and significant threat" to residents.

Chromium has infiltrated homes, businesses, a senior housing complex, even polluted one of the city's firehouses. It has caused widespread fear among residents that they could get sick. Many are desperate to leave, but say they can't because nobody wants to buy homes in such a polluted neighborhood.

"I've seen people who have grown up here get sick and it really scares the hell out of me," said Jennie Coulter, whose Grand Street house, owned by her family for more than a century, was found to be contaminated.

Environmental officials attribute the contamination to a 1983 accident at a small plant known as E.C. Electroplating. The company recovered 30 percent of the 5,560 pounds of chromium that had spilled, then stopped the cleanup in 1985 when the state Department of Environmental Protection said there was "no threat to the public health" and that the "expense of such an effort might not be justified by the result."

For nearly 30 years, the chromium spread under the neighborhood through the groundwater.

Today, chromium levels are so high in the area that federal officials have declared a public health emergency. Residents have been told not to go into their basements.

"If the DEP had followed protocol back in 1983, we wouldn't be in this mess," Coulter said.

"If they sent a letter that an industrial accident happened in your neighborhood, please take these precautions, then fine," she said. "But they didn't. My parents didn't know this. My aunt and uncle never talked about it. Nobody knew anything."

The recent Superfund designation was welcomed by residents because it means the contamination might one day be cleaned up, but it has also further tainted the neighborhood. Some meter readers for PSE&G have refused to go into basements. Plumbers have shied away. Businesses have been hurt.

In 2009, the EPA found chromium in the basement of Mayor Frank Calandriello's moving and appliance business on Midland Avenue. It was decontaminated by the EPA, but that didn't wipe away the fear.

"I had a woman come in here who wanted to return a refrigerator because she thought it might be contaminated," he said. "It's a terrible stigma attached to this. It's just gotten out of hand."

Jim and Charlotte Campistrous bought their home on Monroe Street in 1982, a year before the spill. They raised two children and have been active members of the community, with Jim a longtime volunteer firefighter. But ever since chromium was discovered in their basement, they've wanted out.

"Financially, it destroyed us," Jim Campistrous said. "There is no value left in this house."

Charlotte Campistrous, echoing the sentiment of many residents, wants the government to buy her home so she can leave.

"Tear it down, clean it up, but get me out of here," she said.

The chances of a buyout are slim.

Because E.C. was a small, family-owned company that struggled financially before going out of business in 2009, the EPA believes that taxpayers, not E.C., will end up paying for the cleanup. That makes a buyout less likely than if the site were owned by a polluter with deep pockets.

"We're not able to suddenly say, 'We can buy you out,' " said Walter Mugdan, who oversees Superfund cleanups in New Jersey and New York for the EPA. "We're not able to say, 'We can offset your loss of value if there is one.' But we can say, 'We are here. It's a high priority for us. We've put some of our best people on it. And we aim to finish the job and finish it well.' "

In another blow to the residents, even law firms that had expressed interest in a class-action suit against E.C. have shied away, fearing there's not enough money at stake.

"We got letters, we got calls, but in the end there was no interest," said Charlotte Campistrous.

The neighborhood by the Passaic River, with its large stock of aging multifamily homes and businesses, often floods during heavy rains. The chromium in the ground seeps into the basements along with the floodwater. When the water evaporates, chromium dust is left on the floor. The dust can become airborne and settle on other surfaces.

In one building that has been contaminated multiple times, the Golden Tower senior apartments, the dust had a yellow tinge. At the firehouse, the pollution was discovered when someone noticed greenish water seeping into the basement. In other instances, the danger wasn't as obvious.

In the mid-1990s, Coulter spent hours in her basement doing laundry while her little girl played with her toys on the floor. She never noticed anything. Last year, the EPA found hexavalent chromium in the basement. Coulter looks at her daughter, now 13, and worries.

"It kills me every day to look at my child and realize she may have been down there with that stuff," Coulter said. "I really pray we don't get sick."

Coulter's family lived in the neighborhood for five generations. Her earliest memories are of eating apricots and tomatoes her grandparents grew in the back yard of the house on Grand Street that her great-great-grandfather built in 1906.

She moved out of the house with her daughter in 2004 and now rents it out.

EPA contractors scrubbed the basement and installed a sump pump and a French drain to keep the contaminated water from infiltrating the house. The basement is padlocked and off-limits to tenants. Air tests of the first and second floors came back fine.

Still, Coulter is uneasy about letting people live in the house.

"I don't know what else I can do," she said. "If I can't rent the house, I can't pay the taxes. If I can't pay taxes, I have to lose the house. I feel kind of crummy renting it out."

Hexavalent chromium has long been linked to lung and stomach cancer. Breathing the dust or other contact with the substance also may lead to asthma and other respiratory problems, skin rashes, anemia and irritation and ulcers in the stomach and small intestine.

It's difficult to prove a direct link between pollution and a specific diagnosis such as cancer. Exposure to chromium differs from person to person. How much chromium gets into the basement? How often does it get in? How much time do people spend in their basements?

"People want to ask, 'Am I going to get sick because I've lived in this house for the last 10 years?' " said Mugdan of the EPA. "And we can't answer that. We don't have the capability of answering that."

The state health department also can't definitively answer that question. Health officials used the state cancer registry to assess the number of cancer cases in the neighborhood since 1993, the year the contamination was found to have spread to a city firehouse. In late October, the health department reported that cancers there aren't significantly higher than the statewide rates.

But health officials cautioned that some of the cancers associated with hexavalent chromium can take decades to emerge, so their study may have been conducted too soon to capture problems. They also acknowledge it is difficult to track the many people who have moved out of this neighborhood full of apartments and rental homes.

Residents wonder why the state relied on statistics rather than going to the neighborhood to examine and talk to the people who live and work there. Given the government's talk about how dangerous the contamination is, residents say they would feel more comfortable with health monitoring.

"No, hell no," said Charlotte Campistrous, when asked if the results gave her any peace of mind. "My husband has breathing problems, asthma, bronchitis, everything. He's got every one of those other symptoms associated with chromium."

Sam and Medina Cajevic bought the house next door to E.C. Electroplating in 2003 for $350,000. They put about $50,000 down and felt they could make the mortgage payments by renting out the basement.

They said they were never told about the chromium spill.

At first the Cajevics loved their new home with its backyard deck and aboveground pool. But the tomatoes Sam Cajevic planted next to E.C.'s wall never seemed to grow. And the new sod he laid down and watered everyday was dead within a few weeks.

They learned of the chromium from their basement tenant, who researched it online after the EPA announced it would test homes in the area. The renter moved out abruptly.

Cajevic said he doesn't think his house is contaminated, since it has flooded only once in the seven years he's owned it. The EPA has taken samples twice from the basement and both came up negative, he said.

Still, the stigma of owning the house right next to the factory where the chromium spilled cannot be overlooked. "We couldn't sell this house even if we wanted to," said Cajevic, a plumber. "Who's going to want to live next to this place? If I knew seven years ago, I wouldn't have bought it."

It's a common sentiment among property owners.

"A lot of Realtors will say, 'As long as you disclose it, it won't be that big a deal,' " said Joe Biondello, whose family owns four rental buildings in the neighborhood. "But to be honest, I don't see why anyone would want to buy into the problem."

The Cajevics haven't spent much time in the back yard in years or even on the deck that's 5 feet aboveground. The pool is falling apart.

"This back here scares the heck out of me," Cajevic said, pointing at the wall. "I don't want to take any chances. I don't want to put anything in my mouth that grew in that ground."

The couple have one son in college and a daughter due to graduate from high school next year. Bills are piling up. They are looking to get a loan modification with their bank based on the plummeting value of their house.

"It's worth a try," said Sam Cajevic, 48. "Where am I going to go? Where are we going to move? I'm too old to start over again."

The Riccio family has owned the modest two-story house on Lincoln Place for 80 years. It was built around 1910, more than a quarter-century before E.C. Electroplating opened down the block. The frequent flooding of the basement is exacerbated by an underground stream that flows beneath the house, the family said.

Michael Riccio's brother, Nick, who lives on nearby Sherman Place, remembers the day in December 1983 when he saw a commotion down at the E.C. plant. A DEP truck was parked out front, along with a fire engine.

"They said it was just a spill, that it was no big deal," said Nick Riccio, 64.

The spill was mostly forgotten by residents in the ensuing years. Michael Riccio, who grew up in the house with Nick and their sister, Judy, moved back to its second-story apartment in 1988 with his wife, Bernice, and his growing family. His parents lived on the first floor.

Michael Riccio ran a fence-installation business out of the basement, where he would store his equipment. He broke several walls down to make it one contiguous space. He stored his daughters' bicycles down there and set up a treadmill for his wife and him. Most of all, he liked to go down there by himself to turn lumber into something useful. He built everything from cabinets to a backyard gazebo.

"He had four women to deal with, so he needed his space," Bernice Riccio said, laughing.

He started looking ashen and feeling fatigued in the fall of 2006. A few days before Thanksgiving, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died 18 months later.

"It's always in the back of my mind," said Bernice Riccio, a kindergarten aide. "If they cleaned it up, would my husband still have gotten sick?"

In May, the sump pump installed by the EPA in the Riccio house broke and water sprayed all around the basement, potentially contaminating the house again. The EPA repaired the pump, but the Riccios are still waiting for the agency to come in and clean up the basement. The EPA said it had to divert staff and contractors in Garfield to another Superfund site hit hard by Hurricane Irene in August, but are trying to get to the Riccio house.

"It's been months and they haven't done anything," Bernice Riccio said. "They take their time. They don't rush."

This year's reassessment of property values in Garfield was like a slap in the face: The city said the home's value more than doubled to $227,000. The family appealed to the county this past summer, citing the chromium contamination, and the assessment was lowered to $183,000. It's still far too high, as far as the family is concerned.

"This is our family house and it's worthless," Nick Riccio said.

Bernice Riccio is even more blunt.

"Our house is worth crap," she said. "We're stuck here. If we wanted to sell it, we couldn't. My in-laws used to say, 'One day this will be yours. Divide it among all the children to do what you wish. If you want to live here, live here. If you want to sell, sell.' That's gone now. It's been ruined."

Riccio with husband Michael, who died of leukemia in 2008. He used the basement as his workshop.

The basement often flooded during a hard rain. And unbeknown to Riccio, that floodwater coated his basement with hexavalent chromium, a deadly carcinogen.

Riccio, 56, died of leukemia in May 2008.

A few months after his death, the federal Environmental Protection Agency began testing basements in the neighborhood for contamination — 25 years after nearly 3 tons of hexavalent chromium had spilled at a nearby factory.

Chromium was found in Riccio's basement. While the substance has not been linked to leukemia, his widow is sure that at the very least it exacerbated his illness.

"Maybe he would have gotten [leukemia] without it," Bernice Riccio said. "But he was always down there. And it was always down there with him."

The Riccio house is in New Jersey's latest Superfund site: a neighborhood of 600 homes and businesses sitting atop a massive plume of hexavalent chromium that the federal government says is "an immediate and significant threat" to residents.

Chromium has infiltrated homes, businesses, a senior housing complex, even polluted one of the city's firehouses. It has caused widespread fear among residents that they could get sick. Many are desperate to leave, but say they can't because nobody wants to buy homes in such a polluted neighborhood.

"I've seen people who have grown up here get sick and it really scares the hell out of me," said Jennie Coulter, whose Grand Street house, owned by her family for more than a century, was found to be contaminated.

Environmental officials attribute the contamination to a 1983 accident at a small plant known as E.C. Electroplating. The company recovered 30 percent of the 5,560 pounds of chromium that had spilled, then stopped the cleanup in 1985 when the state Department of Environmental Protection said there was "no threat to the public health" and that the "expense of such an effort might not be justified by the result."

For nearly 30 years, the chromium spread under the neighborhood through the groundwater.

Today, chromium levels are so high in the area that federal officials have declared a public health emergency. Residents have been told not to go into their basements.

"If the DEP had followed protocol back in 1983, we wouldn't be in this mess," Coulter said.

"If they sent a letter that an industrial accident happened in your neighborhood, please take these precautions, then fine," she said. "But they didn't. My parents didn't know this. My aunt and uncle never talked about it. Nobody knew anything."

The recent Superfund designation was welcomed by residents because it means the contamination might one day be cleaned up, but it has also further tainted the neighborhood. Some meter readers for PSE&G have refused to go into basements. Plumbers have shied away. Businesses have been hurt.

In 2009, the EPA found chromium in the basement of Mayor Frank Calandriello's moving and appliance business on Midland Avenue. It was decontaminated by the EPA, but that didn't wipe away the fear.

"I had a woman come in here who wanted to return a refrigerator because she thought it might be contaminated," he said. "It's a terrible stigma attached to this. It's just gotten out of hand."

Jim and Charlotte Campistrous bought their home on Monroe Street in 1982, a year before the spill. They raised two children and have been active members of the community, with Jim a longtime volunteer firefighter. But ever since chromium was discovered in their basement, they've wanted out.

"Financially, it destroyed us," Jim Campistrous said. "There is no value left in this house."

Charlotte Campistrous, echoing the sentiment of many residents, wants the government to buy her home so she can leave.